Freefall
by CaffieneKitty
Summary: Quiet, introspective, melancholy stuff about Dean. Ficlet.


**Disclaimer:** If they were mine... oh, if they were mine...  
**Warnings:** Spoilers up to and including 'No Exit'  
**Summary:** Quiet, introspective, melancholy stuff about Dean.  
**A/N:** Well, I'm not sure where this came from exactly, the largest part was written after "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" and the rest after "No Exit". No matter how long I look at it, I'll never be happy with it. If I don't post it now, I'm going to keep changing things and changing them back again, and it's going to _eat my brain_. So here it is.

  
**Freefall**  
by CaffieneKitty  
- - -

After John dies, Dean dreams. His father is in them every time, just watching, looking sad. Sometimes in the dream Dean tries to talk to him, but John just looks sadder and turns away. Not sad. _Disappointed_.

Dean wakes up, gritting his teeth against making any noise, slaps on his crumbling mask of 'funny and annoying' and soldiers on for Sam. But it can't last. Change is coming, too soon.

One morning when Dean wakes up, Sam has gone. It's disgustingly early, and there's no note. As he stumbles around half-asleep looking for where and why Sam had gone, Dean is certain - absolute cold, dead certain - he feels his father's disappointed eyes on him. He spins, sees nothing.

_Watch out for your brother_ whispers in his memory.

For an endless minute afterward, before his brain has caught up with reality, Dean hyperventilates, the irrationality of dream-fog convincing him that he's already managed to screw it all up, that he's already lost Sam, and that... whatever was exchanged for his life was wasted.

When Sam returns with crap convenience store coffee, Dean is sitting, calm, watching the Weather Network, walls up and locked in place, mirror-bright like the shine on the Impala. Sam raises an eyebrow, Dean smirks, "What? Their Early Morning National Forecaster is hot." Sam rolls his eyes, hands Dean a coffee, and they get the day going.

If Dean reduces himself to his lowest common denominators of snark and horndog, Sam doesn't worry. Doesn't give him those looks that Dean catches, like he's afraid maybe next hunt Dean will step into the monster's embrace and let it end. Afraid that Dean will throw the life he's been re-issued away in grief and horror over what their father did to save him. 

Dean has no proof, just that feeling, and a nagging point of reference, here, there. The speech Dad gave him, before whispering in his ear seems more like a dream than the dreams he's having now, but it was a eulogy. Dad knew that when he left the hospital room, he'd never see Dean again. Whether he went and fell in a fight with the Demon, or did something else, incomprehensible, surrendering his long fight, just to save Dean.

A Reaper, Sam said. Nothing beats a Reaper, they're like a royal flush in spades. Leaving Dean with the twisting feeling of wrongness oozing through him like a rivulet of tar. But he is alive, and whatever exactly happened to make him live, he can't waste it.

He won't. He can't. He has orders.

Then there was the Roadhouse. Jo, and her angry words. He knew somehow, Ellen had never wanted to tell them about their Dad and her husband. She had wanted to take Sam and Dean on their own merits and try to heal over the scars left by her husband's death. But then Dean came along and tore them open again, unknowingly.

He still didn't know what had made him lie to Ellen, why he hadn't just handed the phone to Jo and stayed out of their family issues. Not really. It wasn't all wanting to get his own back, after the way Ellen had forced Sam to own up to his abilities, expose himself. Not all. But that was part.

Then he'd let Jo go on with the hunt, even though her inexperience shone out like a fire in a graveyard. He could've stopped her, but didn't. He still wasn't sure why. Something akin to throwing her into the deep end, maybe; making her realize the water was wet, cold, swift and lethal, and that normal looked a hell of a lot better than the inside of a fear-stinking coffin.

In Dean's dream that night, his father won't even look at him, not even when he's screaming.

- - -  
(end)


End file.
